Three months ago, when the Education Debt Recovery officers came for me — apparently my college loans had been sold to a collection agency that operates child labor camps — I ran. Not just away from something, but toward something. Toward here, Maroon.
Octavia's Parabellum
Octavia Butler remains one of the most formidable science fiction writers of all time. Period. A pioneering Black and woman writer for the genre, Butler is also a notable thinker who belongs to a group we at Scalawag consider "The South Deferred"—writers, intellectuals, activists and others who may not themselves call the South home, but are Southerners by way of the Great Migration. While Butler is known for her Pasadena origins, her grandmother Estella labored on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1920s to save enough money to relocate her and her seven children to Southern California during an early wave of the movement. Upon resettlement out West, however, Butler's mother and grandmother remained structurally tethered to the plantation's legacy, as both women earned a living as domestic laborers who often lived on the property of the white, affluent families who employed them.
Beyond these geographic, familial, and labor qualifiers, it is the themes of slavery, racialized and gendered exploitation, reproductive violence, environmental catastrophe, political corruption, odyssey, and migration that permeate her vast oeuvre—informed by Butler's lived experience—that are inherently Southern matters and, therefore, are always on the table for interrogation here at Scalawag.
Posted inRACE & PLACE
The Parables Are an Autopsy
Posted inARTS & SOUL
